Baseball Player & Spy

Moe Berg was a second-rate baseball player but a first-rate spy for America and its Allies.

by Unknown

When baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig went on tour in baseball-crazy Japan in 1934, some fans wondered why a third-string catcher named Morris “Moe” Berg was included. Although he played with five major league teams from 1923 to 1939, he was a very mediocre ball player. He was regarded as the brainiest ballplayer of all time. In fact Casey Stengel once said: “That is the strangest man ever to play baseball.” Why did Moe Berg go to Japan with all the baseball stars?

Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth

The answer was simple: Moe Berg was a spy working undercover for the United States.

Moe spoke 15 languages, including Japanese. He had two loves: baseball and spying.

In Tokyo, garbed in a kimono, Berg took flowers to the daughter of an American diplomat being treated in St. Luke's Hospital, the tallest building in the Japanese capital.

He never delivered the flowers. The ball-player ascended to the hospital roof and filmed key features: the harbor, military installations, railway yards, etc.

Eight years later, General Jimmy Doolittle studied Berg's films in planning his spectacular raid on Tokyo.

Catcher Moe Berg

Berg's father, Bernard Berg, a pharmacist in Newark, New Jersey, taught his son Hebrew and Yiddish. Moe, against his father’s wishes, began playing baseball on the street at age four.

His father never once watched his son play. In Barringer High School, Moe learned Latin, Greek and French. He read at least 10 newspapers every day.

He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, with Spanish, Italian, German and Sanskrit added to his linguistic quiver.

During further studies at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and at Columbia Law School, he picked up Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Arabic, Portuguese and Hungarian.

While playing baseball for Princeton University, Moe Berg would describe plays in Latin or Sanskrit.

The R.A.F. destroys the Norwegian
heavy water plant targeted by Moe Berg.

During World War II, he was parachuted into Yugoslavia to assess the value to the war effort of the two groups of partisans there. He reported back that Marshall Tito's forces were widely supported by the people and Winston Churchill ordered all-out support for the Yugoslav underground fighter, rather than Mihajlovic's Serbians.

The parachute jump at age 41 undoubtedly was a challenge. But there was more to come in that same year.

Berg penetrated German-held Norway, met with members of the underground and located a secret heavy water plant, part of the Nazis' effort to build an atomic bomb.

His information guided the Royal Air Force in a bombing raid to destroy the plant.

Werner Heisenberg

There still remained the question of how far had the Nazis progressed in the race to build the first Atomic bomb. If the Nazis were successful, they would win the war. Berg, under the code name "Remus," was sent to Switzerland to hear leading German physicist Werner Heisenberg, a Nobel Laureate, lecture and determine if the Nazis were close to building an A-bomb. Moe managed to slip past the SS guards at the auditorium, posing as a Swiss graduate student. The spy carried in his pocket a pistol and a cyanide pill.

If the German indicated the Nazis were close to building a weapon, Berg was to shoot him and then swallow the cyanide pill.

Moe, sitting in the front row, determined that the Germans were nowhere near their goal, so he complimented Heisenberg on his speech and walked him back to his hotel.

March 2, 1902 – May 29, 1972
Moe Berg’s baseball card is the only card on display at the CIA Headquarters

Moe Berg's report was distributed to Britain's Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and key figures in the team developing the Atomic Bomb. Roosevelt responded: "Give my regards to the catcher."

Most of Germany’s leading physicists had been Jewish and had fled the Nazis mainly to Britain and the United States. After the war, Moe Berg was awarded the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest honor for a civilian in wartime. But Berg refused to accept, as he couldn't tell people about his exploits.

After his death, his sister accepted the Medal and it hangs in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

Truth is stranger than fiction! One of a long line of great and not so great Jewish baseball players.

(4)
Anonymous,
June 17, 2014 4:55 PM

Never heard about

Patriot,
June 17, 2014 6:07 PM

Read more

Quit wasting time watching TV and read more.

(3)
Linda,
June 17, 2014 4:44 PM

Fantastic story! Who knew? Would make a great movie!

(2)
Curt W.,
June 17, 2014 3:05 PM

More to Moe

Very nice story on Moe Berg, but there was even more to this extraordinary man. The biography tells his story in more detail, including his eccentric side as a hoarder. But I would argue that he wasn't a second rate ballplayer as you say. He was, in fact, a major leaguer, albeit not as all-star one. He played with and against some true greats. Thanks for an interesting piece.

(1)
g.berry,
June 15, 2014 10:22 AM

Amazing story...I have never heard anything about this before...thank you! If there is a book on Moe it would make a great gift for a sports-crazed teenager!

Anonymous,
June 17, 2014 2:38 PM

There is book about Morris "Moe" Berg

The book about Morris "Moe" Berg is called: The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. The author is Nicholas Dawidoff.

phyllis Goldman,
June 17, 2014 4:55 PM

msngoldman@gmail.com

Yes, there is a book, great one about moe....his name is in title though I do not remember author...online may help. Also read Jane Levin's book "Sandy Kovace" not a spy, but a great man. P.

I've been striving to get more into spirituality. But it seems that every time I make some progress, I find myself slipping right back to where I started. I'm getting discouraged and feel like a failure. Can you help?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

Spiritual slumps are a natural part of spiritual growth. There is a cycle that people go through when at times they feel closer to God and at times more distant. In the words of the Kabbalists, it is "two steps forward and one step back." So although you feel you are slipping, know that this is a natural process. The main thing is to look at your overall progress (over months or years) and be able to see how far you've come!

This is actually God's ingenious way of motivating us further. The sages compare this to teaching a baby how to walk. When the parent is holding on, the baby shrieks with delight and is under the illusion that he knows how to walk. Yet suddenly, when the parent lets go, the child panics, wobbles and may even fall.

At such times when we feel spiritually "down," that is often because God is letting go, giving us the great gift of independence. In some ways, these are the times when we can actually grow the most. For if we can move ourselves just a little bit forward, we truly acquire a level of sanctity that is ours forever.

Here is a practical tool to help pull you out of the doldrums. The Sefer HaChinuch speaks about a great principle in spiritual growth: "The external awakens the internal." This means that although we may not experience immediate feelings of closeness to God, eventually, by continuing to conduct ourselves in such a manner, this physical behavior will have an impact on our spiritual selves and will help us succeed. (A similar idea is discussed by psychologists who say: "Smile and you will feel happy.")

That is the power of Torah commandments. Even if we may not feel like giving charity or praying at this particular moment, by having a "mitzvah" obligation to do so, we are in a framework to become inspired. At that point we can infuse that act of charity or prayer with all the meaning and lift it can provide. But if we'd wait until being inspired, we might be waiting a very long time.

May the Almighty bless you with the clarity to see your progress, and may you do so with joy.

In 1940, a boatload 1,600 Jewish immigrants fleeing Hitler's ovens was denied entry into the port of Haifa; the British deported them to the island of Mauritius. At the time, the British had acceded to Arab demands and restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. The urgent plight of European Jewry generated an "illegal" immigration movement, but the British were vigilant in denying entry. Some ships, such as the Struma, sunk and their hundreds of passengers killed.

If you seize too much, you are left with nothing. If you take less, you may retain it (Rosh Hashanah 4b).

Sometimes our appetites are insatiable; more accurately, we act as though they were insatiable. The Midrash states that a person may never be satisfied. "If he has one hundred, he wants two hundred. If he gets two hundred, he wants four hundred" (Koheles Rabbah 1:34). How often have we seen people whose insatiable desire for material wealth resulted in their losing everything, much like the gambler whose constant urge to win results in total loss.

People's bodies are finite, and their actual needs are limited. The endless pursuit for more wealth than they can use is nothing more than an elusive belief that they can live forever (Psalms 49:10).

The one part of us which is indeed infinite is our neshamah (soul), which, being of Divine origin, can crave and achieve infinity and eternity, and such craving is characteristic of spiritual growth.

How strange that we tend to give the body much more than it can possibly handle, and the neshamah so much less than it needs!